Masculine/Feminine

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 370-371:

The Lacanian 'formulae of sexuation' make up a crucial part of Žižek's thinking: one way of characterizing the overall trajectory of his work is as a movement from a masculine logic of the universal and its exception towards a feminine logic of a 'not-all' without exception. However, Žižek does not simply oppose the masculine and the feminine, but rather argues that the masculine is a certain effect of the feminine: 'Man is a reflexive determination of woman's impossibility of achieving an identity with herself (which is why woman is a symptom of man)' (p. 253). That is, everything in Žižek can ultimately be understood in terms of these two formulae. As Žižek asks: 'What if sexual difference is ultimately a kind of zero-institution of the social split of humankind, the naturalized, minimal zero-difference, a split that, prior to signalling any determinate social difference, signals this difference as such? The struggle for hegemony would then, once again, be the struggle for how this zero-difference is overdetermined by other particular social differences.' (p. 311) [....]